the project

When Ravi Shankar visited Los Angeles in 1965, it was Paul Horn who introduced the Indian musician to some of the more prominent L.A. musicians. Shankar chose Horn to perform on flute for his Portrait of a Genius album. Under the sitar player's concentrated tutelage, Horn quickly mastered the forms and demands of Indian classical music. When the flutist traveled to India to study transcendental meditation in 1966, he took advantage of the opportunity to make his own recordings with some of the country's most promising musicians.

Black Sun's seventy-seven minute digitally remastered compilation, Paul Horn In India & Kashmir, brings together the two albums first released in 1968, In India and Paul Horn In Kashmir. This CD offers some of Horn's most profound, cross–cultural expressions, as well as one of the most accessible presentations of classical Indian music to be found anywhere. The first seven cuts feature students of Ravi Shankar playing with Horn. Although he does not appear on the recording himself, the sitar master adapted three classical rãga melodies especially for the session. Horn's languid, yet technically adept, flute improvisations meld perfectly with the artful performances of native vina, sitar, tabla, and tambura players. The remaining six cuts were recorded in Kashmir with a group of musicians attending to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the renowned meditation guru with whom Horn was studying. The resulting collaborations between the flutist and his Indian hosts explore a wide variety of moods and tempos: melancholy evening rãgas, light classical pieces, popular religious songs, and late night rãgas in praise of beauty and nature.

the artist

A classically trained flutist, Paul Horn played jazz with Chico Hamilton, served as a top studio musician in Los Angeles, and recorded with his own quintet in the early 1960s. During that time, he won two Grammy Awards for his Jazz Suite On The Mass Texts. Increasing dissatisfaction with the Hollywood lifestyle led Horn to India on his search for alternatives, where he studied meditation and began to explore other ways of playing his instrument. The success of his intuitive and contemplative improvisations on Inside the Taj Mahal (11062) proved that audiences were ready for a new approach, and opened the door to a series of recordings inside acoustic and architectural wonders around the world, including Inside the Great Pyramid (12060) and Inside the Cathedral (11075). Both Horn's cross–cultural collaborations, and his highly refined works for more conventional Western ensembles have garnered much critical acclaim.